Thursday, October 22, 2009

Wall Street's House of Cards Still Falling Down

I kind of hate it when Atrios does his "it's not over yet" posts about the economic meltdown, because I think he's right and it's scary. This article on Wall Street's mortgage Ponzi scheme certainly lends some weight to that theory. Worth reading in full, but here's the money grafs.

Three plain talking judges, in state courts in Massachusetts and Kansas, and a Federal Court in Ohio, have drilled down to the “straw man” aspect of securitization. The judges’ decisions have raised serious questions as to the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures that have transpired as well as the legal standing of the subsequent purchasers of those homes, who are more and more frequently the Wall Street banks themselves.[...]

There’s no doubt that one of the contributing factors to the depression of the 30s and the intractable unemployment today stem from a massive misallocation of capital to both bad ideas and fraud. Today’s Wall Street, it turns out, is just another straw man for a rigged wealth transfer system.

Which is exactly what Atrios has been saying for well over a year now. It seems history repeats itself because people get comfortable when, rightly or wrongly, they feel secure and forget its lessons.

2 Comments:

The failure of Alan Greenspan to carry out the laws that were passed to prevent this will brand him in my mind as the worst of the robber barons. Even knowing false AAA ratings were deluding investors, he held off from cracking down - sure that the effects would be distributed too widely to result in the crash they did result in. Putting a person in regulatory positions who feels free to evade the law should be another crime that the worst president ever should be indicted for.